Posted
by
samzenpus
on Friday September 06, 2013 @02:04AM
from the biggest-there-is dept.

An anonymous reader writes "If you're a fan of gigantic volcanoes you'll be happy to know that the biggest volcano on Earth, and one of the biggest in the solar system, has just been discovered under the Pacific Ocean, about 1,000 miles east of Japan. From the article: 'Called Tamu Massif, the giant shield volcano had been thought to be a composite of smaller structures, but now scientists say they must rethink long-held beliefs about marine geology. "This finding goes against what we thought, because we found that it's one huge volcano," said William Sager, a geology professor at the University of Houston in Texas. Sager is lead author in a study about the find that was published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Geoscience. "It is in the same league as Olympus Mons on Mars, which had been considered to be the largest volcano in the solar system," Sager told National Geographic.'"

They didn't "redefine" it, they studied it until they understood it better. If you go to the doctor, are you upset because you get a diagnosis of a specific bacterial infection and a prescription for antibiotics instead of a diagnosis of "fever" and a bleeding to restore the balance of your bodily humors?

You can safely assume a "that we know of" clause on every scientific statement ever made. Scientists don't bother actually stating it because it would get rather repetitive and unreadable, plus it's not the only such assumed qualification and including them all would make science papers and books about 20x longer.

And of course the claim you state was never made anyway since we already know of bigger volcanoes. Which is an example of these implied qualifications: the Mars volcanoes are not active, to the best of our knowledge they are volcanoes - the geology matches what we expect volcanoes to be and so on. However, a volcano by definition requires a magma chamber and we since they aren't active we can't be 100% sure. There is no other mainstream explanation and they fit volcanoes like a glove so no qualifications would usually actually be stated, the electric universe folk think they are scars from electrical discharges as an example of a completely different interpretation.